- The Border Patrol wraps operations in Charlotte and arrives in Raleigh this week.

And North Carolina's Auditor releases two audits that achieve statewide headlines.

This is State Lines.

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(dramatic music) ♪ - Welcome back to State Lines, I'm Kelly McCullen.

Joining me today, political analyst Joe Stewart.

To his right, Donna King of the Carolina Journal, Michael McElroy of Cardinal and Pine and WUNC Radio's Colin Campbell in seat four.

Hello everyone, I rushed through that.

Lots of topics, lots of immigration issues in our state because federal Border Patrol agents wrapped large scale immigration operations this week over in Charlotte.

Mecklenburg County Sheriff Gary McFadden says federal authorities notified him that Operation Charlotte's Web has concluded.

At one time, the arrests were a couple of hundred, now we're up near 400 people arrested in that immigration raid that we are told.

ICE will continue working the Charlotte area on a smaller scale.

Governor Josh Stein made an announcement on social media about the operations earlier this week.

- We've seen masked, heavily armed agents and paramilitary garb driving unmarked cars, targeting American citizens based on their skin color, racially profiling and picking up random people in parking lots and off of our sidewalks.

Going after landscapers simply decorating a Christmas tree in someone's front yard and entering churches and stores to grab people.

This is not making us safer, it's stoking fear and dividing our community.

- Colin, I've heard these comments, Raleigh's mayor, we'll get to that next segment, but the governor muted tones, call 911 if you feel unsafe.

What was the gist of the comments by Governor Stein?

Was it implying that call local authorities if you felt threatened by immigration or?

- You know, it was sort of, one of the comments he made was to sort of document what they were doing, which a lot of the advocacy groups that are supporting the immigrant community have been saying like, you know, get out your phone, take video of whatever they're doing and if you see something you think is improper, then you've got some sort of grounds for I guess a complaint of some kind.

But this is kind of a strange situation that the state's not getting a whole lot of information about what Homeland Security is doing with their immigration actions.

So Stein is sort of out there to weigh in on it, but he doesn't really know any more than any of us do 'cause they're not talking to the state officials.

The state officials aren't involved in what's been happening this week.

So it's sort of tricky to, as a journalist it's been really a struggle to even find decent information on what's happening, who's being charged, are there people with criminal records, are they just people who are here illegally, are some of them US citizens?

It's all been kind of this big question mark that we've been trying to get at and I think both Stein and other local officials are getting at too.

- What were your expectations as a journalist?

Do you believe federal authorities owe you any feedback when they're actively in the field?

Should they tell you anything?

- I mean, usually within a day or so, typically what you get from any law enforcement agency that I deal with, particularly the state and local agency, is you get the names of the people, what they're charged with, and they can very easily look up their criminal record.

And so that's something you'd expect to see.

Federal agencies work a little bit differently and they don't seem to feel like they're obligated to provide that information.

They're sort of doing it selectively.

- Mike, in these cities, the Trump administration clearly says these are quote, blue cities, soft on crime cities, if you will.

It's all about the political allegation here.

The local police and things have said in the past they didn't want to cooperate with ICE.

So ICE comes in to imply federal law enforcement onto a federal issue.

Why can they complain now?

They chose to opt out and so they got opted out.

- Well, I think that they can complain now because of what is happening to the citizenry.

Because these operations, despite the political approach, both in the Trump campaign that he won and recently of the worst of the worst, I mean, we've seen 370 arrests in Charlotte alone, 44, this is coming from the department, 44 with criminal records.

That's a heck of a load more people without criminal records than that have criminal records, which refutes the worst of the worst.

And the idea of how they're doing it, I mean, breaking windows, dragging people out that they don't know whether they're actually the target or not, some of them being American citizens.

I think that the overall effect, I think is exactly why these communities are complaining, not just city officials and local law enforcement, but the residents themselves.

- Donna, in this political dynamic right now in 2025, I remember a day when I was a kid, if you were a conservative Republican, you would not probably support troops, even militia or national guardsmen in your city when you have local police.

What's changed about our dynamic of localism, local leadership over local problems?

- Sure, sure.

I mean, I think it's exactly to what you said that Mecklenburg County, some of our bluer cities have not been cooperative in the past.

This is a federal law enforcement operation.

And from their view, they say, we aren't getting cooperation from the locals, so we're not going to demand it.

But I think one of the big things that's changed is this social media hysteria.

We have these very well-funded activist groups coming in and generating a lot of fear and a lot of hysteria in the communities, not just among people who perhaps are here illegally, but around people who are not.

People going to bus stops and blowing whistles and all these other things.

And the 44 people who have criminal records, that could likely represent the worst of the worst.

They've released several of those, and certainly not all of them.

But if people are here illegally, they're here illegally.

And I think that's what the federal government is talking about.

And I don't think this is the end.

I think that this is a chance for them to get sort of that top layer of folks that they think are here illegally.

And I think that they're going to be coming back.

- Joe, it'd be an ingenious move if I could get everyone who didn't like what I was doing in one room, blowing whistles and shouting at a few of my agents.

I can work this city a lot easier if these protests are nice and condensed, if you will.

I've put a lot of thought into this.

Is this popular?

America did vote.

It was a promise.

We were going to do mass deportations, the largest in American history.

It's starting to happen.

Is this astroturf protesting, or is there a silent majority, or are people not liking what they see?

- Interestingly enough, you raise the point.

And this is an issue that Donald Trump ran on in his campaign for the presidency, that they would take, his administration would take far more aggressive approach to dealing with the issue of illegal immigrants that are living in the United States.

Some part of this is just the culmination of the Trump administration's desire to take this action.

Fundamentally, though, we still need to start the conversation.

What does meaningful immigration reform look like for this nation?

In many instances, people have come here and have integrated themselves into our communities that are working and sustaining their families by taking on jobs that perhaps are not able to be filled by people that were here lawfully.

So we've got to address this issue.

What we don't want to do is inadvertently create a problem in our own economy because we're taking one approach over the other in terms of enforcement.

But I don't see any effort on the part of Congress at this point to try to take up meaningful immigration reform.

- I mean, that's one of the challenges, right, that some of these people, I read a story about someone who was here illegally, was trying to seek asylum because her home country was violent and she was under threat there, but had not been able to get that status, and therefore she was included in the arrest and no one knows where she's at right now in terms of being in custody.

- Activists were tracking the agents in Charlotte, said they appeared to be pulling out.

Well, they were coming to Raleigh, I guess some of them were, working Raleigh streets earlier this week.

In Wake County, 19,000 students, we were told, it was reported, were absent from school this week.

Raleigh City Hall Project, Donna, stalled as construction site was empty.

They say that's their workforce.

Federal officials have not said how many, at least when I wrote this script, I hadn't said how many people had been detained in Raleigh and it changes by the second.

Lot more visuals in Raleigh.

The empty City Hall Project, and they go, "Whoa, that's our workforce."

- Yeah.

- And wow.

- We saw it across the triangle, actually.

The City Hall Project certainly being one of them, North Hills.

We were getting calls in our newsroom that hundreds and hundreds of people didn't show up to work, and then of course students.

So it did make a really strong visual image to say all of these people are afraid to go to work.

But that also shows how reliant that we are, particularly in the, for example, construction industry.

Yes, look, all of these people feel threatened by law enforcement, by federal law enforcement.

North Carolina is one of eight states that had more than 75,000 people come in between 2021 and 2023.

So this is one of those things that North Carolina also is climbing on human trafficking.

So there is a lot of trends moving and the crime rate growing in Charlotte.

All of these things are creating this fear, and I think that's a lot of the reason why we saw a lot of absenteeism.

- Michael, one side does feel threatened.

There's criminals on our streets, they'll say, and sometimes it's these illegal aliens, as they're now calling these folks.

And then you've got the other people saying the federal officials are terrorizing innocent people, our neighbors, and they're disappearing.

I don't see any ground to feel good about any of this situation.

It's a policy, but what happens now when both sides feel tense and tight?

- Well, I think most studies will show that people who are here illegally don't commit crimes at a higher rate than people who were born here and live here.

That's one.

I also don't know that what's generating this fear are the people trying to do something about it.

I think what's generating the fear are the broken windows and people being pulled out of their vehicles.

But I will say that I don't believe that Trump did campaign on what we're seeing.

The people who voted for him, and make no mistake, there was a serious immigration issue to be done.

I don't think the people that voted for him to do it expected construction workers who hadn't committed crimes, the people who clean their houses and are awesome people would just be here trying to work.

And they definitely didn't think in their mind to include the person that the News Observer reported the other day.

She's 23, she fled Honduras at 14 because her father had been murdered by a gang and her mother died of cancer.

So even though she came here to live with family and was going to high school and graduated high school and was becoming a member of society, I am confident that the people who wanted something really different to be done about immigration weren't expecting those people to be dragged out of there and then disappeared.

It's not that people are saying that they can't find, their families do not know where they are.

And so what I think we have to do to move forward is to say, all right, look, I don't think this is what we meant.

So can we just calm down?

Can we just stop and then try and figure out what that reform looks like?

Because no one's trying to do it.

No one's trying to come up with what do we do now.

And I think that what's next is super, what happens next is crucial to being able to get through this.

- It seems like a shift among Republicans to me because we followed the debates in the state legislature of the years about these ICE cooperation bills.

And the message from the House Speaker and other Republicans was we need to go after violent criminals who are getting detained and then are getting let out in the streets because the sheriff's not cooperating with ICE.

That's a very different argument than we should round up everyone who's here illegally and put them on the next plane or put them in jail.

- I think it also shows that there's the lesson, one of the lessons to be learned is that when state and local won't cooperate with federal law enforcement, it creates a scenario like this where we have a ton of questions.

And when that law enforcement can't get answers and they can't do their jobs, because of state and local, it creates these kinds of problems.

North Carolina requires E-Verify, for example, for companies that are 25 employees or less.

Does that need to be five employees?

You know, that's the question that we need to say, look at from a policy perspective.

- Joe, I don't know what to make of this.

The issue's gonna be around.

But what about these federal agents out there?

These are men and women who are hired.

Good signing bonus is being recruited.

They're doing their job.

They're getting shouted down by a loud group of activists.

What do you say to them?

I've seen online, we won't serve them food, we won't serve them drink.

They're doing what they're told to do by their government as part of their job.

- The men and women that serve in law enforcement in this country, state, local, or federal, it's a hard job on its best day.

And this is a particularly difficult challenge, because it's an enforcement action that's now been wrapped around a political issue.

And so it makes the contentiousness between the officers that have been assigned the responsibility to go out and arrest people that are here illegally to determine whether or not they need to be detained in that regard, and the citizens that the law enforcement community is sworn to protect.

The tension is palpable, and the political consequences of this are pretty significant.

We already have a relatively high level of people distrusting government at all levels, and I think this exacerbates that a little bit.

But to the point, I mean, everything we can witness in this regard will become an element of how a critical group of voters perceive the issue sets going into the midterm elections.

We talk about people's relative sense of criminal and criminal activity.

That's a subjective perspective, and crime rates are not necessarily what motivates someone to say they think crime is a priority public policy issue.

But we'll see if this has gone too far in terms of the perception that a critical group of undecided voters going into the midterm elections will either vote for or against candidates of the president's party as a result of this.

I think it's a little too early to determine that.

But it's a significantly difficult challenge for anyone in law enforcement to feel as though they don't have the support of the citizenry.

- Our next topic tonight follows state auditor Dave Boliek.

He made headlines two different ways through two high-profile audits earlier this week.

The first audit tracks vacant jobs at the State Department of Health and Human Services.

Auditor Boliek says those vacancies, by not being filled, freed up $386 million or so in cash over time for DHHS, money the agency's able to keep.

Auditor Boliek pondered if the savings should have been directed towards the state's Medicaid funding shortfall.

DHHS, Joe says, "Yeah, we had job vacancies.

"We have to have our contractors pay a ton of overtime "to make up for labor shortages."

However, over $300 million in lapse salaries goes back to the department at a time Josh Stein and his team say we need $319 million to backfill the state's Medicaid shortfall, which is reduced payments to nursing homes, hospitals, and doctors.

There you go.

- Well, I can speak a little bit about this from my 10 years working in state government.

It's not inconsistent with a state agency's necessary strategy to attract and retain the quality of workforce they need to be able to have money to shift around to different positions.

DHHS is a great big agency.

It's 18,000 employees, and if you look at the federal money that they manage to, it's a $40 billion a year enterprise, and many of these positions within the agency are actually paid, at least in part, if not entirely, by the federal money that the department manages, principally for Medicare and Medicaid, but for other public health purposes as well.

It has been true for a long time that agencies have a tendency to use lapse salary and salary reserve in an effort to try to figure out the best way to get the employees they need.

The state system for hiring employees is kind of rigid, doesn't necessarily reflect what the marketplace realities are to get in somebody with a certain level of expertise.

The state structure may not make it possible for those positions to be funded at a level where they can offer compensation necessary for that skillset, so lapse salaries and that sort of stuff has long been a way agencies have addressed those issues.

- But this week, Donna, as a way to make a headline to say that was some money you could have used to pay Medicaid.

- Right, right, yeah, absolutely, and I think that this really highlights the we keep adding these layers and layers and layers of bureaucracy onto all of these agencies, and on one hand, they're sitting on millions and millions of dollars.

They didn't even post 320 of these positions that they had money for, and then saying we need more money, so that's constantly what the lawmakers are dealing with at every state agency says the answer to this is you need to give us more money, but disregard the pot of money that we're sitting on over here, and that's one of the challenges, and it's not easy for money to get shuffled from one pot to another.

It just speaks to a large mismanagement budget problem.

- Mike, this is politics at its core, it always is, but this audit has got the seal of approval on it.

There is $300 million sitting there, and we need $300 million, so how does this play out in Raleigh among the politicians?

- Um, this is not gonna be the answer you want.

- Just kick back.

(laughing) - I don't care how it plays with the politicians.

- It is called State Lines, not Kelly's Show.

(laughing) - But in this case, because we're talking about Medicaid, and we're talking about the recipients of Medicaid, but I did want to say, we're about to talk about the other audit, right, and the other audit within CORE, Bullock was like-- - Come back to Medicaid.

- I'm coming, I'm coming.

- Was criticizing that agency for taking money from one area because it wasn't underfunded, and then using it in other, and then creating problems.

So, I don't know.

This is what I know.

Let's just assume that this is, I don't agree with this, but let's just take the premise that this is a Josh Stein Council of State issue.

Republicans in Congress could come and, not Congress, the House and Senate could come and fix this today.

The most glaring thing about those Medicaid bills, both houses passed a bill, and correct me if I'm wrong, zero people voted against them.

This is two separate bills that would have taken care of this problem, 'cause this is a rebase issue, zero people, and they still couldn't get it done.

Now, I know that I may be alone at this table, but that's where I go when trying to fix this issue.

- Collin, what I like about Mike up here is, he does bring it back to the people.

I'm watching these political debates and battles.

That's what we do here.

And so, how easy will it be for the public and for insiders in Raleigh to look at the tactics of the timing of a release, the Boliek opinion versus looking at getting back to the people and getting them some medicine if they need it?

- Yeah, I think the average North Carolina, particularly someone who's on Medicaid, doesn't really care the semantics of who's wrong, who's misspending the budget.

There's money in the bank.

There needs to be a certain amount that goes towards Medicaid patients and the Medicaid budget.

And when you don't have that, you have people who are losing access to their doctors, who may not be able to get weight loss drugs that they otherwise would qualify for.

That's what they care about.

They're probably just fed up with all the politicians pointing fingers at each other instead of actually doing something.

- Completely, and that's one of the things, is that Medicaid is funded through April.

We've got, it's not something happens today.

It's not something they need to deal with.

And Governor Stein calling an emergency session, which normally is reserved for things like hurricanes, this is something that the legislature is going to deal with.

They've been talking about it.

They've been negotiating.

And there is some runway for this.

- But until they do it, they haven't done it.

- Well, no, but this is the legislative process.

- And their track record of functionally getting stuff done this year has not been great.

- This is the legislative process.

- But they're not coming back.

I mean, they're not coming back till January.

So we're talking six months.

- But they still have money, though.

They have money through April.

- They have money through April, and they're scheduled to come back in December.

- They do, they do.

But what I'm saying is this idea of like, well, the reason we're doing these cuts now, right, is you don't have to do it right now.

We're gonna do it.

And that's my point.

If you haven't done it in six months, you're gonna be back in February.

And it's not like they're gonna come back and like, hey, how was your break?

Let's go.

I got it.

We can solve it.

No, it's gonna be months before.

- They can do that as well if they want to.

They drew districts in a week, Michael.

They can do anything in the wrong.

If they wanna do it, Joe.

But if you're fired up now, let's talk about NCOR.

The second audit came out, revealed, I don't know how else to put it, shortcomings at the state office that helped victims of Hurricanes Matthew and Florence last decade.

The office is called NCOR.

The audit revealed hurricane victims didn't get to break ground on a new home until three to four years after being approved for hurricane recovery funds.

Some families were living in temporary housing.

That can be hotel rooms, 1,400 days, so the last four years.

$25 million was spent on software and estimated $300 million deficit through 2024.

NCOR has completed about 30% of its projects, by my math, as of April 2025.

There's that table for you, Michael.

Silver lining in NCOR, or is Josh Stein vindicated by saying, you keep doing what you're doing, we're gonna set up this Western Office of Recovery for Helene victims and do something new?

- Well, the skepticism I had in the previous audit will not translate to this one, because it's hard to do anything other than going, what, when looking at this one.

It's been going on for years.

But there is a silver lining to me.

I was speaking about it earlier.

Now, it's a silver lining, a mud, a heck of a lot of really big things that this audit also found was very clear that this was not an issue of fraud or abuse.

And to me, that means that these errors, these substantial errors, were good faith errors, people wanting to do the right thing and not, being overwhelmed or making mistakes down the line.

Again, huge mistakes.

But I think that you can build off of good faith errors.

And so if everybody is in a bipartisan, it's so hard to do, but not impossible.

North Carolina actually has a pretty good record when the noise dies down of coming together and figuring out in a bipartisan way.

If they can do it bipartisan way while also acknowledging that whatever solution they're still going to be confronting with even the most efficient program in the world, vast costs, it's gonna cost a lot of money to fix these homes, and that Eastern North Carolina, Western North Carolina, they're not the same.

So the solutions are gonna have to be varied.

- Colin, this audit comes out right as Michael Watley's taking heat for what he did or didn't do out in the West with President Trump.

And now here's a 500-page audit dropped in our lap.

You know it's coming back, or it's never gonna go away from here on out.

- Oh yeah, I mean, you're gonna see ads in this US Senate race that are probably the faces of the people who have waited five, six, seven years to get a house rebuilt when the state had promised them years ago that they were gonna get funding to do it, and they're gonna lay that at the feet of Roy Cooper who's been governor for most of this process and really was unable to sort of fix this problem.

I mean, granted, part of it is a federal issue.

The federal government puts so much red tape around these programs when they really should just write the dang check and get it over with as opposed to having the local agencies jump through all these hoops to get people's houses rebuilt.

But certainly we're gonna hear this issue a lot.

And as that audit notes, there's a need to stand up some sort of standard system that we can use in every disaster as opposed to rebuilding the infrastructure to rebuild homes every time you get a hurricane 'cause you're gonna get a hurricane every few years in North Carolina.

- You know, these audits do have advice.

Not that Dave Bollick's advice is above anyone else's advice, however, it is a roadmap.

Do this, do this, do this.

We think North Carolinians would be better served.

You buy that.

- Yeah, Colin is absolutely correct.

And having been part of an effort for two hurricanes, for Fran and Floyd, it is messy business trying to get people restored to where they were.

Many times the documentation that the federal program necessitates, the person is lost.

I mean, they've lost every possession so they don't have the things that the federal requirements include.

I think having a permanent entity that's focused on these issues outside of the time when we have to respond to natural disasters, and we will, even things like their predictions now are for five additional inches of rain each year, we may have more casual flooding types of events, but to focus on mitigation, to do the things that are necessary to try to preclude disasters from being so expensive in their recovery.

- Joe, could Republicans possibly do that in North Carolina because to set up an office of mitigation implies that you're acknowledging that natural disasters on a recurring regular basis are now a normal part of living on this earth?

- Yeah, I think they can.

And in large part, we know that there are other types of disasters other than things that people might say are or are not a function of climate change.

But like wildfire, I mean, we're gonna see greater threats from wildfire for a while just because there's a lot of timber on the forest floor as a result of Hurricane Helene.

But I think it goes without saying that this planet has a molten nickel core with plates of dirt that are not even attached to each other.

I mean, it's kind of a haphazard place to live.

I don't know what the second choice of a planet to live was.

This one's kind of dicey at its best.

But it makes sense for us to say if people are gonna live somewhere in the state where a peril of a natural disaster exists, we should do the things to mitigate the potential loss when a bad thing does happen.

- Donna, legislators, Republican leaders could have applied a lot more oversight to NCOR, much like they're doing with the Helene recovery now.

How did the communication fall through the gap?

To Mike's point, if it's just bad bureaucracy, can anyone fix it?

- Well, NCOR's had, lawmakers have been having oversight committee hearings for years on NCOR.

You know, they spent a billion dollars.

You've got 378 people.

Remember, we're talking about hurricanes from 2014 and 2016.

- But it didn't.

- This is a decade.

- 10 years ago.

- But it didn't ring that bell, you know?

It didn't make anyone angry enough to do something.

- They were already having hearings when Cooper was still in office.

So, you know, it's been happening.

They've been having hearings for several years now.

And NCOR was set up under the Cooper administration.

They had time to fix it.

They were doing reviews throughout, and they just didn't do anything about it.

You still have 370-odd families still, still without homes from 2014, 2016.

NCOR spent about an average of $230,000 per family on their temporary housing.

They could have built houses for that.

And that's one of the issues that they have.

This really highlights a tremendous mismanagement of taxpayer resources.

- Well, hopefully we don't get much more practice 'cause that means more storms and more heartache and more devastation.

So once again, it's a pretty heavy show this week.

Thank you so much for sharing your insight.

My goodness, Joe, good to see you.

Donna, Mike, Colin, happy Thanksgiving to everybody.

Thank you so much for watching even more.

Email us your thoughts and opinions.

I know you have them at StateLines@pbsnc.org.

I'm Kelly McCullen.

I appreciate you and I'll see you next time.

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